Call for Papers

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We are currently standing on the brink of a new era of computing systems: moving on from desktop computers, computing intelligence will be woven into the “fabric of everyday life”, seamlessly and almost invisibly pervading our environment and delivering services adapted to ourselves and our context of use. One of the key aspects of such user-centric pervasive-adaptive systems is their ability to sense and react to the user’s personal experience. Different aspects are taken into account: emotional state, cognitive engagement, physical conditions and social situation. The combination of these characteristics together with recognizable human behavioural patterns forms the personal awareness of the system. Additionally, information about the surroundings is gathered and used to establish environmental awareness. Considering such a setting, the overall goal of user-centric pervasive adaptation is to create systems that are able to derive, suggest and perform actions to optimize user comfort and performance, assisting people in their specific activities and situations. That implies systems tailored to the specific user, everywhere, always available, seamless and responsive to the situation in real time and life.

In order to find ways of realizing empathic user-centric pervasive adaptation, several issues have to be addressed that require research in different disciplines, from psychology and sociology to man-machine interaction and computer science. Psychology has to provide methods to sense, analyse and influence the psycho-physiological state of the users. These results could then be taken into account to optimize the design of intuitive interactions between the user and the system. The main concern of computer science is to establish a basis that allows autonomous computer systems to interpret the acquired sensor data and make reasonable decisions on which adaptation steps to conduct. Besides this, the complexity of pervasive adaptivity calls for novel software engineering approaches and architectures that are able to support the development process by addressing the special dynamic properties of the aspired systems.